


before you start sleeping

by ag_sasami



Category: Kings
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:05:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ag_sasami/pseuds/ag_sasami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He'll take the shape of Joseph with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	before you start sleeping

**Author's Note:**

  * For [withoutmaps](https://archiveofourown.org/users/withoutmaps/gifts).



Shame.

Always the same with his father, with his every decision watched and judged and found wanting. It burned sharp and hot, swallowed down and chased with liquors until they tasted like water. Why prove himself better on a night like this? _Celebrate_ , his father had suggested (threatened, if he'd be honest with himself in a way he never was) and he'd done just that. Quietly tonight though, no loud clubs and empty-eyed girls hanging off his arm, just a dark booth and shots that kept coming. So many shots, until the bar wa tilting around him, the lights swirled together in a nauseating blur and _nothing_ adding up to the right answers. Until there was an arm wrapped around his waist, hauling him up from his impromptu stupor on the tabletop.

Thomasina's face in triple. An empty back alley, early. The darkened seat in the back of a car, windows tinted black, occupied. He'd managed to tip himself over head-first into someone's lap. There were hands against his skull, fingers scratching gently against his scalp and threading through the longest of it, and he focused on the sensation with all the sobriety he didn't have until everything sunk into a pleasant emptiness.

 

He wakes in the darkest hours of the morning curled in on himself beneath cool linen sheets, stripped to his underwear, and a pounding thump starting at the base of his skull. On the bedside table, just out of the moonlight seeping through the curtains, there's water and a bottle of pills. At his back a warm body and the heavy breath of the dreaming against his shoulder; Joseph pressed against his spine like tonight was any other. But he's in a tee shirt (soft and grey) and a pair of shorts Joseph's never bothered (needed) to wear in a bed with Jack in it. He slips from the sheets (takes the pills and the water, leaves Joseph where he lays), and makes his way down the darkened hall.

The bathroom light is harsh, but he suffers it until it drags him to full consciousness. Sitting on the floor the tiles are cool beneath him and the glass of the shower door leaches the heat from his face. Without the oblivion of chemicals he's left too raw, and his chest aches with the unrelenting expansion of grief. It isn't clear how long he sits there floating in and out of consciousness in the chill of the bathroom. He wakes cold but with Joseph is sitting beside him, shoulders and thighs barely touching.

"What happened tonight?" Joseph asks after a few minutes seated in silence.

"My father," Jack croaks out eventually.

"Jack," he begins, stopped with a sharp shake of Jack's head. His mouth is a line of tension and his eyes he squeezes shut against the flood he doesn't want, thought he could avoid. But he's shaking and the room is a kaleidoscope of watercolor light and Joseph is folding him under a heavy arm and pressing reassurance against his forehead in kisses and broken whispers. He doesn't want this (he _does_ ), this vulnerability ( _comfort_ ). Jack clings to Joseph just the same, arms wrapped around his waist and face buried wet against his neck. It's ugly and its weak and Joseph just holds him closer and says nothing at all as he shudders out his horrible heart.

When his eyes are thick with sorrow (tacky, drying salty), humiliation, when his breaths are unsteady but reliable, Joseph ushers him up off the floor on teetering legs. Beneath the sheets again, limbs tangled, Jack slips his hand beneath Joseph's shirt and pushes it up until Joseph relents and pulls it off. It's just skin pressed against skin and Joseph's mouth firm against his own, and the tenderness in it hurts anew, a grief so raw it breaks him again.   

He'll leave before dawn (Joseph doesn't know). Before it comes to that though, Jack memorizes the feel of Joseph's hands on his face, his thumb clearing damp tracks from his cheeks. He memorizes the press of their lips together and the way Joseph's eyelashes fall against his skin when he closes his eyes. He won't ( _can't_ ) ever look back, but he'll take the shape of Joseph with him when he buries it all down for his kingdom.

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Christmas, Nanners!


End file.
